Epic Mountain Climb Proves “Exploration Is Not Dead” | Exposure

This was old school, real turn of the century Adventure. It was everything that exploration and Adventure is and can be, and those elements that we've lost along the way. We wanted an anti-Everest, and we really got an anti-Everest. I mean, Mar, the northern tip of Myanmar, Burma, there was sort of a geographic question mark up there: What is the highest point in Southeast Asia?

There were three options: Kako Razi, Gamlang Razi, and then an unnamed peak. Our initial goal was to try to measure these points and figure out what in fact was the highest. I think this Expedition surprised all of us; it was much more complex right from the beginning than we had anticipated. Immediately, we had to cut half of our gear.

After the first day of walking, which was a 16-mile day with 5,000 feet of vertical gain, we had to cut our gear again, 'cause we realized there was no way that we were going to get enough Porters to carry even the gear that we had. Still, I thought getting to base camp, I would be very comfortable because this is something that I'm comfortable with.

You know, now it's kind of like up, now we go up. We rested one day in base camp before starting to climb, and again, there's no trail; we don't know where we're going. It was up and down and sharp and scary and horrifying, and 6,000 feet of vertical gain from base camp. It started to occur to us that maybe we didn't have everything that we needed, that we had been a little bit hasty with our gear cuts.

I started to wonder at that point if we had enough clothing to withstand the wind that we were going to potentially encounter up higher, and to be fair, we didn't. As we got up to Camp 3, we realized that the terrain ahead of us was just a little bit too complex and too dangerous for five of us to be climbing together, and we needed to cut the team. Now, it wasn't to say that Hillary and Emily couldn't have climbed it; it was just to expedite and try to get to the summit and try to measure this mountain.

We had to look at who had the most experience on that kind of terrain. We left; it was Mark, Renan, and myself. The ridge that we were trying to climb, it was, you know, sort of akin to the edge of a very poorly made saw. You're going to have to reserve some energy because you have to essentially reclimb the whole ridge in reverse.

I got to a point where I felt very concerned that we were putting too much up and down, too much sort of complex convoluted terrain in between us and safety. We don't have sleeping bags at this point; we don't have a tent. We have a stove, but not enough fuel, and I'm scared about that.

Mark started leading the next pitch, so he goes down and around this corner, and there's these huge kind of rock teeth sticking up. Then he came back, you know, 15-20 minutes later and said, "This is it; it's over. It's too complex with what we have to keep going." The summit, you could see it; you could— I mean, it was right there, and it was hard. It was heartbreaking; it's just heartbreaking.

I'm proud that we put in as much effort as we did, and I'm proud of the decision that we made to turn around. You're pushing that envelope; you're pushing that edge. And failures—I mean, I think failure is just a piece of all of this. The major takeaway from an expedition like this is that exploration is not dead.

That's really just going to push us to discover more and more and more about our planet and hopefully inspire us to care about our planet as a human family. I mean, that's putting exploration in sort of a context of something that is important and relevant and needs to continue.